Russia launches key satellite on second attempt

February 26, 2011
by Dmitry Zaks

File picture shows a Soyuz-2 rocket prior to launch. Russia on Saturday successfully launched a satellite vital to the deployment of its own navigation system after the failure of an earlier attempt prompted the Kremlin to sack two top space officials

Russia on Saturday successfully launched a satellite vital to the deployment of its own navigation system after the failure of an earlier attempt prompted the Kremlin to sack two top space officials.

The Federal Space Agency said in a statement that the high-tech Glonass-K satellite reached its intended orbit about four hours after blasting off on top a Soyuz-2 rocket from Russia's northern Plesetsk launchpad.

"We have established and are maintaining steady telemetry communications with the space craft," a spokesman for the defence ministry's space forces told the Interfax news agency.

"The on-board systems of the Glonass-K satellite are functioning normally," the official said.

The launch was watched closely by Russian space and military officials after the last attempt to put three Glonass satellites in orbit failed spectacularly on December 5.

The three orbiters would have completed Russia's own navigation system and enabled the military to finally target its missiles from space -- a technology that has long been available to NATO countries.

But an error prevented the Russian craft from reaching its set distance from Earth and the satellites ended up plummeting into the Pacific off the US state of Hawaii.

A furious President Dmitry Medvedev fired two top space officials after a probe placed the blame on a simple fuel miscalculation.

The three satellites would have completed a Glonass system whose research had been started by the Soviet Union in 1976 before being interrupted and then picked up again by the country's president-turned premier Vladimir Putin.

The country's de facto leader has vowed to place Glonass readers on every car made in Russia by 2012 and hailed the system as an example of how the country can claw back its Soviet-era technological might.

Russia refuses to use the Global Positioning System (GPS) developed in the United States out of fears that its military's access to the technology might be cut off in times of war.

December's setback forced Russia to delay the Glonass system's deployment by at least one year and highlighted the persistent problems plaguing an industry that was once the pride of the Soviet Union.

Related Stories

Russia launched a probe Tuesday into whether the money assigned to create a satellite navigation rival to the US GPS system was being wisely spent, prosecutors said, after the latest launch ended in failure.

The Global Orbiting Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) will be fully operational in 2007, the head of the Russian Space Agency said Tuesday at a meeting with the Russian president, reports RIA Novosti.

Recommended for you

The constellation of Virgo (The Virgin) is especially rich in galaxies, due in part to the presence of a massive and gravitationally-bound collection of over 1300 galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. One particular member of ...

(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers from the U.S. and Italy has found evidence of a naturally formed quasicrystal in a sample obtained from the Khatyrka meteorite. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, ...

As a cosmic dust magnet, Saturn's C ring gives away its youth. Once thought formed in an older, primordial era, the ring may be but a mere babe – less than 100 million years old, according to Cornell-led astronomers in ...

Scientists on board NASA's flying telescope, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, caught sight of roiling material streaming from a newly formed star, which could spark the birth of a new generation ...

Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes to show that a recently-discovered galaxy is undergoing an extraordinary boom of stellar construction. The galaxy is 12.7 billion light years from ...